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Well, this is awkward. The artist Ólafur Elíasson and I are sitting in his
studio in Copenhagen. I’m squinting past him into the bright Nordic sun and
he has just told me, in his matter-of-fact way, that it’s this newspaper’s
fault that his 2012 Olympic project didn’t get off the ground. In his own
words, “The Times f***ed it up.”

It is true that, early last year, a colleague did write a column describing
Elíasson’s Take a Deep Breath proposal — consisting of
people across the world inhaling and exhaling on behalf of “a person, a
movement or a cause” and